Lubricants Distribution

Lubricants distribution is bulk multi-compartment work taken to its extreme. The contamination discipline is the same as for fuels — a compartment holds residue of its last product, so every change of grade has a cleaning cost — but it applies across many more grades, delivered in smaller quantities, to customers who take some products pumped and others packaged. Bulk multi-compartment distribution covers the ground the two trades share: cleaning matrices, pump sequencing, driver qualifications, and the multi-day order book. This page is about what lubricants add.

Many Grades on One Tanker

The tanker side of lubricants runs like fuels, with one difference of scale: many grades, pumped off at different rates. With that many products a grade-by-grade cleaning matrix would be unmanageable, so Optrak’s bulk load optimisation costs transitions by product family — grades within a family follow one rule, and the matrix stays maintainable as the range grows. The rest of the machinery is shared with fuels: permanent product-to-compartment rules, metered and unmetered compartments, and pump sequencing, all checked inside the route optimiser on every candidate move, so a plan that would contaminate a compartment or a pump is never produced.

The cleans are part of the plan. This tanker’s day starts with a wash and a drain at the depot, because two of its compartments still hold a trace of yesterday’s product.

The Hybrid Truck

Not every lubricants customer takes a tanker. Smaller deliveries go out packaged — drums, and cartons on pallets — and in between sits the intermediate bulk container (IBC): a tank of around a thousand litres on a pallet-sized footprint.

The hybrid truck serves all of this from one vehicle. It is a box truck fitted with pumping equipment, loaded with IBCs that are pumped off at the customer’s site — and the same floor space can carry drums or palletised packaged goods instead. What the vehicle can do on a given day depends on what is on the deck: more IBCs means more pumped deliveries and less room for packaged work, and the right split changes from one trip to the next.

For planning, this is capacity that is not a single number — the same situation as a moveable-bulkhead trailer in multi-temperature work. The load — IBCs, drums, pallets — competes for one floor, checked by the loader while the route is built; orders that need pumped delivery can only go on a vehicle with pumping equipment; and the bulk-against-packaged split on each trip is an outcome of the optimisation rather than a fixed property of the truck.

Optrak in Practice: Fuchs Lubricants

Fuchs Lubricants (UK), part of the world’s largest independent lubricants company, runs a nationwide fleet of tankers with up to three pumps and nine compartments, carrying many grades pumped off at different rates. The compartment-and-pump rules that prevent contamination were previously managed by hand — slow, and one error risked contaminating a load.

Optrak automated the route and load planning end to end, interfaced to SAP, with the cleaning matrix and pumping order maintained automatically. Benchmarked outcomes included planning time cut by over 85%, tanker capacity utilisation up 6%, a rise in “no action” loads where a grade can be pumped into a compartment with no preparation, and the most costly wash-out-and-clean actions down 13% — alongside the company’s best-ever on-time delivery performance and a lower pence-per-litre delivery cost.

Related

• Bulk multi-compartment distribution — cleaning matrices, pump sequencing, terminals, and the multi-day order book
• Load optimisation — the bulk loader and the 2D floor-plan loader in detail
• Fleet and resources — drivers, vehicles, and qualification rules
• The Optrak data model — how loading, resources, and orders feed one optimiser